Saturday, December 8, 2012

We’ve
moved in. I think we’ll be very happy in our own place despite the lack of many
comforts and conveniences – no flush toilet, only an outdoor privy, no
electricity, no hot shower unless we heat water on the stove and put it in the
plastic camp shower. But we have beauty all around us, darkness and silence at
night, good soil and water and plenty of sun and rain. Eventually we’ll
probably have solar hot water, electricity and the internet.

My gardening workstation right off the porch. Could also serve as a tiki bar.

Waiting
to get electricity gives us the opportunity to explore other ways to meet our
energy needs. It would be easy to simply connect to the grid, install the
electric shower, get an electric pump to provide water for irrigation. For now
we burn a kerosene lamp and a battery charged LED camp light for our nighttime
use. I have a wonderful solar flashlight that someone gave me when I was
“walking for the climate.”

We
have one small solar panel that will charge Guy’s iPod but not much else. We
hope to add a couple more panels and some storage batteries as our friend Mark, at Gaia Grove near Gainesville, Florida, showed us. From his years of
experience aboard boats he learned many things, including how to use solar
energy for light, radio and a fan.

Last weekend we spent the day planting a 200 sq. feet area according to the agroflorest principles that Guy and Sofia learned at the workshop in October. We had the help of one of our closest neighbors, Felipe. We planted mostly small fruit trees and vegetables of all kinds. Hopefully I'll be able to post more photos as the plants develop but here are a few from last Saturday.

Saturday, November 10, 2012

I've gotten to know the mushrooms in Eastern PA pretty well and have enjoyed eating several delicious varieties. But I don't know my mushrooms here in the Central Plateau region. I know there are psychedelic 'shrooms that grow in cow dung. Yesterday I found these gorgeous specimens pushing up through the leaves in the woods next to our homesite. Iridescent blue butterflies flew around while I went over to check these out, but were gone by the time I got my camera.

The stripped down cerrado is still beautiful! The trees are eucalyptus and the road is the dirt road that leads to our farm.

Wednesday, November 7, 2012

Reflections from the blogger

What’s
the point of posting for all to see and read the little facts of our life here on the Areias farm? Why tell our story, which might end up being very ordinary
or even an abysmal failure? Who cares if we plant a few vegetables and a dozen
trees on an acre-plot high on the central Brazilian plateau?

These
are age-old questions for the writer who shares her own experience with her
readers. Even a letter writer has to choose how much to tell about his own
troubles and successes rather than sticking to more objective matters. And
today it’s the email writer, the facebook poster, and the bloggist who walk the
line between writing about other people, historical or scientific facts, or
impersonal humor, and spilling their own guts and singing their own
praises.

I’ve
taken my cues from a lifetime of reading - my own experience of learning about
life from that intimate sharing that poets and novelists and essayists offer as
they tell me about what it’s like to be them.So
I’m choosing to trust that our sharing of our life here might be worth something
to our readers, whether it be information about the Brazilian Cerrado, and
permaculture and agroforestry, or insight into the lives of retired ex-hippie activists, or inspiration for this age of climate change and 99% awakening, or
simply entertainment.

A report on the Agroforestry Course by Sofia Hart

About two weeks ago Guy and I
attended a 4-day course on Agroforestry. Agroforestry is a way of farming that takes into account the needs of the earth, so that rather
than just exploiting and depleting the soil and surrounding resources, farmers
enrich the soil organically and grow food in cycles and combinations that
complement each other. It is "pluriculture" (vs. monoculture - the
big plantations of soy, corn, etc.) in that farmers are planting vegetables,
legumes, root vegetables, fruits and nut trees, plants for biomass, and other
kinds of trees in the same area. Agroforestry exists in many varieties
around the world, but in its manifestation here in Brasilia, we might plant
things such as banana trees, mahogany, pineapples, coffee, tomatoes, manioc,
lettuce, and arugula all in the same area. The short cycle plants (the
vegetables, etc), will produce first, then the medium cycle (bananas), and then
the long cycle (mahogany). But while you wait for the longer cycle ones to grow,
you can benefit from the shorter ones in the same plot. I thought the
concept of agroforestry was brilliant, but I witnessed just how labor-intensive
it is. In the wake of the course, I planted a wonderful little garden at the
farm. So far, I've planted tomatoes, lettuce, arugula, okra, mustard,
collards, cucumber, radish, and nasturtium (an edible flower). I still
plan on planting more things, including some flowers around the house. In
a couple of months, we'll have more vegetables than we can consume, and
brilliant flowers blooming beside the porch.

The two photos, taken at Brasilia's Botanical Garden, model the agroforestry that many sustainable farmers are using to recover the Cerrado while growing food and trees for timber.

Tuesday, October 30, 2012

From the North. The water line is being laid today and tomorrow - soon the tank you can

see at the back will be full and we'll finally have running water.

First garden beds, full of lettuce, radishes, arrugula, collards, mustard and more. At the front of the photo is a two cubic foot hole for our first trees:

papaya, coffee and pitanga, I think.

And here is Guy at our bedroom window - he's busy today sanding the concrete walls in order to paint next week. I'll be waxing the glazed cement floors in the meantime. As you may remember, we're not too happy with so much cement, but we needed to move ahead and this was the best we could do right now. From now on we hope to be greener, using more Earth-friendly materials.

Saturday, October 20, 2012

First an update on the house - we're adding a porch around three sides of the house, plus a water tower that will double as a shower room. We don't have running water yet but hope to set up a gravity-delivered system drawing from the stream that comes down from the spring above my son's house. Photos will follow when we start working on that project, hopefully next week.

The tiles should be in place by now and the porch floors - glazed cement - will be set by next Tuesday or Wednesday. Notice in the photo below how green the vegetation is becoming now that the rainy season has really arrived. Soon Guy will have to be cutting the grass with his scythe.

The rains also bring in the fruit and one of the first to arrive is the wild cashew fruit of the cerrado. My daughter, Sofia, collected a bag-full yesterday morning - here she is removing the pulpy fruit from the shell that holds the cashew nut, one nut per fruit.

One of the goals of our new life project is to find ways to use the products of the cerrado that grow around us. For local people to stay on the land they need to be able to meet their economic needs as well as finding activities that are satisfying and pleasurable. You could argue that as retirees with a small but steady income (our SS checks) we have the privilege of enjoying the activities of collecting fruits of the cerrado and making ice-cream, jam, and other products, while such activities would be very labor intensive if they were intended to support one's family. Very true - but we see examples around the world of cooperatives developed by local people to ensure the economic viability of this kind of project. Hopefully we'll show many other products as we explore them in the next few months and over the years.

Saturday, October 6, 2012

The building is coming to an end - the little house itself is complete but our friendly masons are putting in a porch on two and a half sides of the house, partly to keep the rain out, but also because it will be so pleasant.

Front of house, facing South.

North face of house.
Despite the negative aspects of the current local building techniques (high carbon footprint for factory-made bricks and cement due to fossil fuels for baking, processing and transportation, and land degradation for extraction of materials), we are pleased with the simplicity of our house. We are installing a water tank that will be filled by gravity-delivered water; we will most likely have dry/composting toilets, solar heated water, and a draining system that will recycle gray water for irrigation. We plan to use solar cooking as much as possible, with gas and wood stoves to supplement.

And we are moving into the planting phase. This past week we paid a fine young biologist, Juã Pereira, who specializes in agro-foresty, for an onsite consultation, and next week Guy and Sofia, my daughter, will take a four-day course in agro-forestry. More on that in a future post. We are grateful to our friends from Lepoco who in July gave us a generous donation to help with this project.

Monday, September 24, 2012

Given the need to
simultaneously stabilize climate, stabilize population, eradicate poverty, and
restore the earth’s natural systems, our early twenty-first-century
civilization is facing challenges that have no precedent. Rising to any one of
these challenges would be taxing, but we have gotten ourselves into a situation
where we have to effectively respond to each of them at the same time, given
their mutual interdependence. And food security depends in reaching all four
goals. from
Plan B 4.0,
Lester Brown

Let
it be recorded that this year our first real rain, with thunder and lightening,
and significant downpour, occurred on this date. A typical time for the rains
to start. Now the trees and other plants will respond with flowers and fruit,
and new growth everywhere.

What
will happen with our unfinished house?There
is still some plastering to do on the outside of the building, and the floor
must be cemented and glazed, after which it needs to dry for three or four
days. We’ve moved back to my son’s house – about 1000 feet away - for the week,
to keep my daughter company, and it’s just as well. We don’t know yet but the
straw hut may leak with this kind of rain.

Have
you read Plan B 4.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization, by Lester Brown? Published
in 2009, while I was walking from New Orleans to the Canadian border along US
Route 11 (“For All the Grandchildren”), Plan B first summarizes the major
catastrophes threatened by climate change and continued population growth.
Food, says Lester Brown, is the weak point that may very well bring down our
civilization. In the second part of the book, Brown offers the major solutions
that could mitigate the devastation that looms over humanity.

When
I read Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet, by Mark Lynas, in the Fall of 2008, I absorbed the predictions of major
and worldwide devastation due to climate change. I found these forecasts
frightening. I worried especially about my own grandchildren and then all the
little ones of the world, the anawim, including the poverty-ridden peoples who
would be affected the most and the soonest by rising sea-levels, droughts,
forest fires, desertification, and food shortages. My outrage at the
indifference and greed - that were, and still are, keeping world leaders from enacting the changes required to allay climate change and its consequences
- led me to take the 1,100 mile walk.

I needed such a walking meditation, an
action that allowed me to calm my own anxieties while communicating with people
along the way, sharing the message, a wake-up call that may have been a tiny
part of the shift in consciousness among Americans who now rate climate change
as a major concern.

Now,
four years later, I read Lester Brown’s account of the situation described by
… - same scientific data, same
predictions – and realize that many of the events they forecast have already
come to pass, such as the melting of the Greenland ice sheet and the increase
in forest fires in the US Southwest. However, Climate Change conferences come
and go and still the world refuses to mobilize to the degree that’s necessary
to avert catastrophe. It seems ever more likely that immense suffering,
especially for the anawim, lies in the close future.

But
I am no longer overly anxious.

The
effects of my walking meditation linger on. Guy and I have come to a place
where we can do our small part: lower our carbon footprint, plant trees in a
sensitive area, grow our own food, join others in experiments with solar
cooking, building with earth (bio-construction), and other alternative tools
and technologies. Permaculture and agroforestry hold promise for the recovery
of soils, water, and habitat and the sequestering of carbon.

Friday, September 21, 2012

Have you been wondering what Guy's up to? Perhaps he'll write about it but here are the pictures. The privy will be complete in a few days. It's a race to see which will get to use first, the house or the privy.

Thursday, September 20, 2012

Sept
19 Last
night was cold – in our tent inside the straw hut, we slept in our clothes
under three blankets. I remember such nights here in the middle of winter –
late June thru mid-August – but by September the nights were always warmer and
the days were hot. People around here are saying that it’s hotter than usual –
high 80’s, even 90. I suspect this is our version of climate change. As long as
it keeps raining we’ll be fine, but we’re on the edge of the region where
desertification is likely to occur with advancing global warming. This is why
we plan to build cisterns and rain catchment systems despite the fact that the
local people consider it unnecessary.

We
have no piped water yet – all our water is brought up from the stream in
buckets.

We’ve been drinking straight from the stream as there are no houses
upstream and the spring is within sight, about a mile west of our homestead.
However, two or three times a day cattle comes down to drink and muddies the
water. The best time to draw water is early in the morning. And we will buy a
water filter in the next few days. We’re keeping our fingers crossed that we’re
not already full of parasites or other disease. No tummy aches so far. We took
our cues from the local workers who drink straight from the stream.

Today
the workers are treating us to a “galinhada” – a big pot of rice, chicken and
corn. On the last day, hopefully day-after-tomorrow, we’ll treat them to a
festive meal. They’re a good bunch – friendly, they tell stories and jokes, and
ask hundreds of questions about the States, the English language, our former
occupations, relationships, etc. They know that we’re environmentalists and
make endless comments – both serious and humorous – about our food, our
systems, and our attitudes. They talk about religion a lot, debating
creationism versus evolution – were the first people Adam and Eve or were they
monkeys, and creationism versus the big bang; and the true nature of Jesus, and
of so-called prophets such as Muhammed. They ask me if I believe in God, if
humans come from monkeys, if homosexuality is a sin against God. I answer
honestly – no, yes, no – and all is well.

One
of them is the typical evangelical believer, so common currently in Brazil,
replacing the complacent and easy-going Roman Catholics. They think that the world’s
greatest preachers are American, starting with Billy Graham. It scares me.

Spring
here begins officially this weekend, while for our friends in the northern
hemisphere it will be the Autumn Equinox. Each holds its own beauty and
promise.

Tuesday, September 18, 2012

Today the internet is very slow and I'm having trouble sending much of a blog. So here's a picture of our house as it stood several days ago. By now it's covered and most of the walls are plastered. Hopefully it will be ready by the end of the week and if the internet cooperates we'll send more photos.

Tuesday, September 11, 2012

This is the big week – we’ve moved onto our own little piece
of the property. Until now we’ve availed ourselves of Victor’s hospitality and
stayed at the main house on the farm, built in the same place and style as the
house my ex and I built in 1974, and lived in until 1980. Zeke was just a year
old when that house was built, and Sofia and Victor were born while we lived
there. Now the grandchildren visit.

My daughter, Sofia, and granddaughter, Camila.

Helen and Scott Nearing inspire us as we begin our life in
the country, and we hope to emulate them by living simply and sustainably. Back
in the 60’s, when as retired professionals Helen and Scott moved from the city
to the countryside in Vermont, the cutting edge of enlightened living meant
back-to-the-earth simplicity, organic gardening and building one’s own house
and infrastructure. Today we continue to value voluntary simplicity and organic
gardening but look to permaculture, ‘agro-floresta’ and bio-construction as the
means to lower our carbon footprint, and live in a way that could be shared by most
of the Earth’s population (99%). We intend to inhabit our space in a way that
will preserve the soil, the water, and the air for our grandchildren and their
grandchildren unto the seventh generation.

For many reasons – because the rainy season will arrive
soon, because we’ve never built a house before, because Guy is still learning
Portuguese, and we’re both educating ourselves about the appropriate techniques
for building and farming in this part of the world – we’ve decided to contract
our first living space to a local building team. They will use mostly the
conventional methods and materials for this area: a squared-off building of
bricks and concrete.

We have no electricity or running water for now. The
building crew must fetch their own water from the small creek that runs by our
place, about one hundred feet down a steep path. We too will fetch our water
every day, but we’re looking at building a bicycle pump as soon as we can. The
model for which we have printed plans can pump 10 gallons a minute on a level
area – water in a pond to a site at the same level – or as little as 1 gallon a
minute on a steep incline. I expect our situation to fall between those two
points. Eventually we plan to collect rain water, and to install electricity as
a backup.

For cooking we’ll use my original solar cooker, which I’ve
had for several years now, supplemented by a two-burner gas stove. The sun at
this time of the year is always bright and hot from about 10 am to 3 pm, and
will cook beans, rice, soup and even bake bread. Soon we’ll have a wood stove
as well, built into the house, but I hope to continue to utilize mostly solar
cooking.

Guy is completing two projects – our first privy and a
kitchen table. He can tell you about them the next time we post.

This morning the macaws flew over our straw hut, chattering
as usual in their rough cawing voices. As we drank our coffee, sitting outside
in the sun, a brilliant turquoise bird with a coal black face alit on a tree
nearby and sang a welcoming song for us. Last night, the first night we slept
here, the stars were magnificent in the dark sky, and looking at it from
outside the straw hut was magical as the light from the lantern shown through
the lacy pattern of the palm fronds. We snuggled in our tent with three
blankets to keep us warm because the winter air at 3000 feet gets down close to
50° F.

Friday, August 31, 2012

August 31, 2012
Experimental stage. I have just created this blog - there will be many changes in the coming weeks. I hope to post at least once a week and to include many photos. Below is a posting that I wrote two weeks ago. I expect that Guy and I will publish many photos, such as this one that shows him clearing the area where our first house will be built. Behind him are babaçu palm trees.

August 19, 2012

Today is our anniversary – Guy and I have been married for
17 years. The week we got married we signed the lease, and during the following
months we set about preparing for the opening of the Green Café.

In something of a parallel, this coming week we hope to
contract with Joaci and Ariston to build our first house, and then we’ll
prepare in the next months, before the rains arrive in full force, to occupy it
as our new home.

Despite the extreme dryness of the season, for it doesn’t
rain here from mid-May until mid-September, life flourishes around us in many
manifestations: two new calves, born about a week apart, follow their black
mothers about on wobbly legs; a large chestnut horse that waited at the gate
yesterday until someone let him in as they passed through, is keeping company
today with the farm’s mare (the one that gave birth to a filly on our
anniversary five years ago); the mango and cashew trees flower copiously;

and
at night the chorus of frogs, crickets and nocturnal birds echoes as loudly as
ever.

The wind blows continuously, too much for comfort, slamming
doors and raising dust clouds, so that a fine layer of dust lies atop the
piano. But I like the loud whisper of the wind in the swaying eucalyptus trees
and well as its rustling in the fronds of the babaçu palms near our little
piece of land. The wail of the wind in the plains of Montana scared me and made
me think of lonely women who felt life wither inside of them as they listened
to that howl day after day with no mother or sister or friend to comfort them.
This wind is gentler and more friendly, though it can get tiresome, like a
friend who goes on too long.

We’re staying in Victor’s house for a few more days, until
the 31st, which is our deadline to be out of here. Then we’ll sleep
and cook and wash up on our own place, in and around the straw hut. Part of me
is excited – it will be an adventure and we’ll be living practically in the
outdoors – but I feel cautious as well because it will be uncomfortable and
might be somewhat dangerous. The recent spate of theft means that there are
unscrupulous people in the area, who will take the opportunity to steal what
they can given the chance. If they also enjoy the sport of scaring and hurting
people that could be horrible. But fortunately that hasn’t been the case in
this part of the region.

I work at spreading peaceful energy and thoughts of kindness
and goodwill around the house and the whole farm. I took a walk up the road to
where I could see the hills and valleys of our Rio Areias headwaters, and I
stretched out my arms asking for
blessings for all its inhabitants.

*Brown beans – Usually we eat black beans but in Goiás pinto
or brown beans are more popular. Some Goianos believe that black beans, which
are eaten in Rio de Janeiro and Salvador da Bahia, make men less virile than
the brown beans, though no statistics would suggest that the population in Rio
or Salvador is increasing at a lesser rate than in Goiás.

**Avocado dessert – Brazilians eat their avocados with
sugar, either in smoothies with milk and other ingredients, or mashed with
lemon and sugar, which is what we had for dessert this evening. We’ve been
eating avocado twice a day because of the abundance; they’re rotting by the
dozen under the trees in the orchard.